[mdlug] open source home storage

[Michael Mikowski]

To Aaron's point, my workstation is the home NFS server (using software RAID), the print server, a public SVN server, a public web server (static SSL and dynamic mod_perl with reverse proxy), MySQL server, an email server (postfix), and others plenty of others I forgot to mention.  I also use it as my desktop, and my son plays tuxracer on top of all that with no problems.


----- Original Message ----
From: Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00 at gmail.com>
To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
Sent: Thu, October 8, 2009 10:33:53 AM
Subject: Re: [mdlug] open source home storage

Stuart Munro wrote:
> I am looking for a open source home nas, I found openfiler and this may
> work.

Why would you want to devote a whole machine to doing nothing more
than file serving?  Are you running some huge website on a LAMP stack
that's so complicated that filesystem reads are a major bottleneck?

> Does anyone have a suggestion on other solutions? I am fairly new to linux
> and working on trying to figure it out

First thing to do is abandon the Windows 1950's computing mindset---that
a computer can only do ONE thing.

When I was in college, most computers in the 1 Mhz to 30 Mhz range would
each perform the following functions:

    mail servers
    print servers
    internet routers

all  IN ADDITION to being general workhorse machines with
anywhere from 15 to 100 users logged in simultaneously
doing either edit/compile/test-run debug cycles or computationally
intensive tasks like SPICE (circuit-analysis software based on
differential equations) simulations.

The only reason there is such a prevalence these days for such things
as stand-alone routers is because, when Windows finally got TCP/IP
networking, it was (and remains), such an inherently unstable platform
which also has great difficulty in doing the rapid context switches
needed to multitask properly without the server processes interfering
with each other to the point of corruption.

Remember, a server is a PROCESS (running software), *NOT* the computer
that happens to be running said software (No matter how much MS
"partners" misuse the term and try to convince you otherwise!)

Even WITHOUT virtualization, a typical linux machine can safely and
reliably (i.e. no duplication needed like with "windows servers")
replace the functionality of 10 Windows machines each devoted to
some obscenely trivial function (receiving bytes on a network and
sending those bytes to a printer;  receiving bytes on a network,
temporarily storing those bytes on disk drives, and later sending
those same bytes again when requested by an e-mail app; etc.)

There is absolutely no reason that your "NAS" can't be the same Linux
machine that you use as a desktop machine, running a full GUI like
KDE 3 or Gnome (KDE 4 is a CPU hog on even the most modern equipment,
so I don't recommend it for anything less than a quad-core).
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